SYSTEMATIC ACCOUNT

The scale of measurement given in description of new species is from the centre of the thorax to the forewing apex.

Information on habitat preference has been gained almost entirely from light trap surveys of G. Kinabalu (Holloway, 1976), the G. Mulu National Park (Holloway, 1984), from collections made by Col. M.G. Allen, T.W. Harman and colleagues in Brunei, by W. Boyd-Wallis in Kalimantan and by A.H. Kirk Spriggs and Dr S.J. Willott in Sabah. Additional data on the fauna of softwood plantations and material from the Forest Research Centre Collection, Sepilok, have kindly been made available by Dr Chey Vun Khen of the Sabah Forest Department (Chey, 1994). Broad vegetation categories were discussed in Part 4 of this series.


Data on geographical range are mainly from the collections of The Natural History Museum (BMNH), but with some additional data on the Sumatran fauna that have been made available through the collecting activities of Dr E. Diehl and other members of the Heterocera Sumatrana Society: a preliminary account of the Sumatran fauna has been published by Schintlmeister (1994). Data for Peninsular Malaysia are supplemented from the collections of Mr H.S Barlow and FRIM, the latter particularly through recent surveys conducted by Dr J. Intachat.

Many host-plant data are drawn from unpublished records of the International Institute of Entomology. These are collated from material submitted to the Institute for identification from throughout the Indo-Australian tropics. Of particular note in recent years are records from material submitted by the Indian Central Agricultural Research Institute Station in the Andaman Is. Plant nomenclature follows Mabberley (1987).

Holotypes of new taxa have been deposited in The Natural History Museum except where indicated to the contrary.

Nomenclatural details of all genus-group names are to be found in Watson, Fletcher & Nye (1980), and are therefore not repeated here. These authors did not indicate generic gender. Whilst the Code of Zoological Nomenclature stipulates that adjectival species-group names should agree in gender with the genus-group name, the application of this is fraught with difficulty (Holloway, 1993[4]). Given modern requirements for computerised database construction, and given the confusion that rectification would be likely to cause amongst users of biosystematics not familiar with the niceties of the Latin language, all species names given here have the orthography of the original description. The reader should also note that the convention of putting author names in parentheses, where the genus of combination is not the original one, has not been followed as the situation is clear from the synonymy attached to each species treated.

The high level of sexual dimorphism in many Lymantriidae, and the fact that taxa are based on either sex, mean that it may be difficult to establish synonymy through ‘marriage’. Several attempts to elucidate such situations have been made in the text following, some of necessity more tentative than others, with some striking examples in Rhypotoses and Perina. There is undoubtedly more ‘matchmaking’ to be done in the current systematics of the Indo-Australian members of the family.

Efforts have been made to examine all relevant type specimens. This has meant that many observations made by Schintlmeister (1994) on the Sumatran fauna have required review, for, as he indicated, he did not have such ready access to types and facilities for their dissection as were available for this current work. Nevertheless, this work has benefited considerably from the ground he had broken, enabling the comparison of two major south-east Asian faunas.

Type material of Strand has not been examined, as searches made on behalf of the author in Berlin and Eberswalde, the two most likely repositories, failed to locate any types of the Strand species occurring in Borneo, all described in Volume 10 of Gross-Schmett. Erde. In most cases the identity of the species has been unambiguous, but that of the Bornean species, Cispia borneensis Strand and C. kinabaluensis Strand, is unclear. The original illustrations show moths that could be Arctornis.


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